Field producers for Assignment Earth arguably have the coolest job in the world. Reporter Rebecca Huntington blends exploring wild places, her favorite pastime, with storytelling to educate the general public on events and issues at the forefront of environmental conservation.

Born in Billings Montana, Rebecca, 38, now lives in Jackson, Wyoming. With a degree in Spanish and Journalism from the University of Montana and as a Ted Scripps fellow of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder she, brings a wealth of knowledge and training to her production work. Reporting for Assignment Earth since 2007 Rebecca connects with researchers and activists to offer viewers an on-the-ground perspective of efforts to protect and preserve the natural world.

What follows is a Q&A interview conducted for Assignment Earth

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The Sage Grouse is a candidate for designation as a threatened or endangered species. As the Interior Department considers the bird’s fate, several research projects are underway across the west to study its behavior, movements and nesting patterns.

Wildlife biologist Bryan Bedrosian locates the birds at night. Sage Grouse sleep out in the open so they can see predators coming. But this also blows their cover.

“The way we see them is by a really powerful spotlight we bring out,” Bedrosian said. “And through binoculars we can pick up the shine, the reflection of their eye.”

Using this common technique researchers can spot a group of sleeping grouse for 800 meters. To capture them Bedrosian deploys rock music and what looks like an over-sized butterfly net.

“We go up to them playing loud music so it distracts them, covers up our foot steps, disorients them a little bit to what’s happening,” he said.

With almost 44 percent of Sage Grouse habitat lost to agriculture, urban development, road construction, energy production and other causes, scientists like Bedrosian are providing vital information that may help this chicken-sized desert bird from going extinct.  What researchers discover could restrict future land usage, especially in Wyoming where sagebrush, the birds’ primary environment, covers more than half the state.

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An interview with director Louie Psihoyos

The truths discovered in documentary films often reveal far more than meet the eye. In his Oscar winning movie “the Cove” photojournalist Louie Psihoyos takes us on an adventure that perhaps shows us more than we want to see.

“I lead an elite team of activists to penetrate a secret cove in Japan to reveal a dark secret,” Psihoyos said.

The Cove, part action thriller, part nature film is the exciting story behind a covert operation to document one of the most horrific atrocities of the 21^st century, the systematic slaughter of dolphins.

“They kill more dolphins than anywhere on the planet right there at this cove, which incidentally is in a Japanese national park, a marine sanctuary,” Psihoyos said. That’s the irony of this whole thing. But it’s also the scene of the captive dolphin trade. Most of the captive dolphins in the world come from this little cove.” Read the rest of this entry »

For millennia, water has spread across the broad expanse of the Florida Everglades. But in the last 100 years or so man has blocked its path with roads and dug canals to drain and reroute its course. Now some parts of the Everglades have too much water and some have too little.

“The problem is the Everglades are our water supply.” said Eric Buermann of the Southern Florida Water Management District. “And there’s only 40 percent of the natural Everglades left after man’s drainage and decimation of the natural environment.”

Investing almost $1 billion the state for Florida has instituted a research program to correct the growing problem. Engineers hope to apply what scientists learn to get water running again where there’s too much of it and let it flow into places where there’s much too little of it, like the Everglades National Park. Read the rest of this entry »

“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” – Winston Churchill.

When it comes to oil spills no one knows this better than Native Alaskans.  Indigenous Arctic tribes learned their lesson during the Exxon Valdez debacle of 1989. In this edition of Assignment Earth several leaders of the Inupiaq Tribe came south to tour the devastation of the recent British Petroleum disaster that continues to spew toxic crude into the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast.

“We had many miles of our beaches like this,” said Alaskan native Earl Kingik. “ A lot of our shore birds fly away and don’t come back to Point Hope due to this kind of oil activity, this oil spill.”

Native Alaskan/Exxon Valdez survivor Earl Kingik tours the Gulf Oil Spill

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Moving Mountains symposium on the extiction crisis

I’m sure it wasn’t just the altitude. Over Memorial Day weekend I nursed a raging headache at Mountain Film in Telluride. There was also a deep churning at the pit of my stomach that made me feel a bit uneasy. But at 9,000 above sea level I believe the symptoms I felt were less due to a lack of oxygen than it was the sudden and intense onslaught of complex ideas, passion stirring images and ire-raising conversations that are typically part of the Mountain Film experience. As passionate artists, athletes and activists come together to share their particular view of life on Earth, most who attend are roused to an emotional reaction they can feel in their hearts and minds as well as their bodies. Read the rest of this entry »

Dust that settles on high mountain ice will have a profound affect on the rate at which snow melts and flows into steams below. New research shows that light absorbing particles speed the transmission of sunlight to melt snow much faster than previously thought. Read the rest of this entry »

With government support, a huge land purchase by conservationists protects prime habitat for grizzlies, mountain lions and other sensitive species. In order to maintain wilderness habitat in the Swan Valley of Montana The Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Land has bought and set aside 367,000 acres in the Montana Legacy Project.

Land once the owned by the state’s biggest private property holder Plum Creek Timber Company is now closed to development. Parcels scattered throughout forested area will be protected as corridors for the free movement of many wild species including large carnivores.

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The documentary film “Tapped” is a glaring indictment of the bottled water industry. Directed by Stephanie Soechtig this expansive look into the commercial acquisition, production and distribution of the Earth’s most precious natural resource, fresh drinking water, is a horrifying tale of abuse and corruption. The story spans the socio-political landscape from small municipalities to multi-national corporations across the globe. But at its heart the film speaks to the personal responsibility each of us must assume in the perpetuation of a product that we freely purchase as its consumption and improper disposal is slowly killing us.

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At high elevations in the northern Rockies, mountain pine beetles are killing countless whitebark pine trees, a major source of food for wildlife including grizzly bears. Read the rest of this entry »